creating a new spatial grammar for the networked age

In the interest of furthering the discussion of what the networked city actually is, I am posting a short text I wrote recently. It is a little heavy on the academic/geographic jargon which I apologize for, but that was the audience I wrote the piece for. The sources for the in-text citations can be found at the bottom of the essay. Additionally, I would consider the essays and books cited at the bottom an excellent entry point for anyone interested in studying the geographies of the networked city. You will notice pretty quickly that there is not much traditional geography in the list; I pull from many directions and I think that doing so is a necessity for anyone studying the complexities of our contemporary moment.

A New Spatial Grammar

The world’s population is predominantly urban (UNPF 2007). The cities holding these billions of people fit no common mold. Part of recognizing and studying these new landscapes is the need for what Colin McFarlane (2011a) calls a “new spatial grammar”. As digital, pervasive computing technologies become commonplace and spread into the everyday landscape, a new spatial grammar is emerging obliquely out of computer science terms such as ‘open source’, ‘hacking’ and ‘ubiquitous computing’. Architectural historian Kazys Varnelis calls for urbanists to hack the city (Varnelis 2008, 16), to create interventions in the landscape rather than plans, and to revision the city through the many complex assemblages of culture, nature, and technologies that make up cities today. Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell (2011) bring the everyday, mobile and wireless personal and urban, ubiquitous computing technologies into the urban landscape. Saskia Sassen, acting as a public intellectual more than a political economist, calls for an ‘open source urbanism’ (2011a) and for ‘talking back to our intelligent city’ (2011b) as ways to counter the discourse coming from private information technology providers such as IBM and Cisco on the responsive ubiquitous networks embedded in the landscape.
Conceptualizing the geography of contemporary cities to include the overlay of pervasive computing connectivity necessitates bringing new terms into geography. Here are three key terms to my research:

Ubiquitous computing:
Emerging out of information science, ubiquitous computing describes the the technological overlay of everyday life. As digital technologies become so small they are essentially invisible, and as these computing technologies can communicate with each other and between individuals wirelessly, the systems become invisible (Bell and Dourish 2011; Greenfield 2006). A common example today is the mobile phone (Greenfield and Shepard 2007). The invisibility and the near-universal adoption of devices such as mobile phones is the becoming everydayness of digital technologies. The systems disappear into the landscape, in a similar way to other networked systems such as water or transportation, becoming taken-for-granted. While ubiquitous computing has typically focused on the user experience and its impact in urban spaces, there is also a significant infrastructural component to providing and maintaining these systems. Ubiquitous computing systems do not spontaneously generate, just as water does not inherently flow out of the tap. There is a spatialization to how ubiquitous technologies are used in the urban landscape, and there are spatial ramifications to how these systems are embedded in the landscape (Shepard 2001).

The geographic utility of ubiquitous computing is that this everyday overlay of digital responsiveness impacts urban spaces both through the opening up or the foreclosing of action in public space—and private or semi-private space—through the locational information received on a smartphone, or the blanketing presence of security cameras limiting the ability of a group to comfortably gather in a public park (Crang and Graham 2007). This is the ‘above ground’, individualized utility, either beneficial or repressive, of ubiquitous computing technologies, but for this always-present responsiveness to exist requires a significant amount of networked information and communication technology infrastructure, communicating across systems and across platforms. Similarly to water or electrical infrastructure systems, these digital infrastructure (Zimmerman and Horan 2004) systems have a small but noticeable impact on the urban landscape as well today, but as Saskia Sassen points out, opening up these systems visually could be a means to bring the relationships between city and citizen to the surface, to highlight how these relatively invisible technologies impact our individual and collective experiences (Sassen 2011a; 2011b). Additionally, the responsiveness—the instantaneous communicative potential—of ubiquitous computing could enable this visualizing of the flows of the modern city that Sassen speaks of. Politicizing these infrastructures locates these ubiquitous systems in the public sphere and not behind the closed doors of city hall and in the programming of private, corporate technology providers such as Cisco or IBM. These ubiquitous things, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, are a networked actor in performing public life, and their role in mediating social and spatial exchanges should be noted (Latour 2005a; 2005b).

Networked city:
The networked city is embedded with responsive, communicative ubiquitous computing capacity. The networked city is an urban form based primarily around the service industry/information economy, but also encompassing other, more traditional urban economic activities (Castells 2000; Graham and Marvin 2001). This city may still have industrial outputs, but the core economic activity is based around creative (in the largest sense), digital production. Consequently, information and communication technologies linking inter-urban and intra-urban networks together and between other nodes both near and far in the information economy are central to the socio-economic output (Mitchell 2003). The networked city is the above-ground, visual representation of the flows of the networked infrastructures that underlie the urban fabric (Graham 2002). It is important to note that the networked city is built on and around the modern, industrial city and the post-modern suburban sprawl. The networked city prioritizes flows of information, but supported by flows of modern infrastructural networks—water, electricity, and gas, and transportation (Kaika and Swyngedeouw 2000).

Architectural scholar Kazys Varnelis considers the networked city as more than a singular urban are, instead considering the megalopolitan sprawl of, for instance, the greater Northeast or Southern California as the contemporary networked city (Varnelis 2011). The on-the-ground condition of the networked city can be considered one of splintering urbanism (Graham and Marvin 2001), of glocal disconnect and zones of premium network provision, where the modern ideal of universal infrastructure provision has failed and certain areas of a city are left to crumble into ghettos, post-industrial brownfields, and other areas of general and particular neglect, while other areas, such as central business districts, edgeland office parks, corporate entertainment or heritage zones, airports, and other globally repeatable spatial products (Easterling 2005) are hyper-connected to each other, but disconnected from the particular city as a whole. Infrastructure networks in a landscape of splintering urbanism no longer—if they ever did to begin with (Coutard 2002)—exist to provide a unified urban ideal based on collective progress, but instead today provide individualized benefit at the expense of the city as a whole. 

Assemblage:
Assemblage scholarship, as a geographic application of Actor-Network Theory, offers a means to study the spaces through which human and non-human actors, and the connecting, mediating networks, interact (Amin and Thrift 2002; Farias and Bender 2010; Latour and Hermant 2006; McFarlane 2011b). Assemblage scholarship includes the spaces through which the networks flow directly, not just as a background element to the relationships being charted. Infrastructure in the contemporary landscape is a product of the social as well as a conduit through which the social is constituted (Easterling 2011; Star 1999; Star 2002). It is possible to consider the various systems bundled together as ubiquitous computing as unique networked ecologies, and to map out how these systems interface with each other and with the city at large. Ubiquitous computing, as the spatialization and spread of everyday digital technologies into the landscape, and the networked information technology infrastructural systems that connect these communicative devices, defies place-bounded analysis. As these ubiquitous systems redefine proximity and distance for the user, they re-inscribe the landscape through instanteous connectivity. Associations between disconnected spaces are made through these pervasive communication networks. Assemblage scholarship is a means to trace these networks across space, through and between the various networked ecologies of the contemporary landscape, ecologies that may or may not be spatially proximate, but are still joined.

An example of assembling the landscape of the networked city is found in the term ‘networked ecologies’ (Varnelis 2008). Although the term has yet to gain widespread recognition in geographic scholarship, I find it a useful term to contain the natural and cultural worlds and the many infrastructural systems that network many things together. Networked ecologies are the meshwork of human and technological, built and natural environments that constitute cities today. Infrastructural networks interface between the various networked ecologies across time and space. For instance, a water supply as a natural ecology may pass from one watershed to another to provide a city with this vital element, connecting two disparate locations. Or, a telecommunications system, localized in one city links that place with every other connected place in the world, through a complex weave of fiber-optic cables, satellites and satellite base stations, data centers, co-location points, and mobile phone antenna. This connectivity is not organic, it is actively built and maintained, but at the same time, it is not spatially separate from the rest of a city. It is placed in real places, not just in the end-user’s device such as a mobile phone. No place is solely human or completely natural; this condition is amplified exponentially in urban settings. The spaces of a contemporary city are assembled through flows of natural systems such as water through infrastructures that are enmeshed with other infrastructural systems creating many layers that then interact with local iterations of human and other urban animals’ habitations, as well as with political regulations and cultural values. This call and response between the near and the far, the human and the technological, material and digital flows and the embedded groundedness of physical infrastructure, underlies the cultural activities and economic products that are typically foregrounded as the prominent, visible face of a city.

Sources:

Amin, A., and N. Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the Urban 1st ed. Malden, MA: Polity/Blackwell.

Castells, M. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Coutard, O. 2002. “Premium Network Spaces”: A Comment. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26 (March):166-174.

Crang, M., and S. Graham. 2007. Sentient Cities: Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space. Information, Communication & Society 10 (6):789-817.

Dourish, P., and G. Bell. 2011. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. The MIT Press.

Easterling, K. 2005. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Instituet of Technology.

Easterling, K. 2011. Fresh Field. In Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, eds. N. Bhatia et al. New York City: Princeton Architectural Press.

Farias, I., and T. Bender eds. 2010. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London ; New York: Routledge.
Galloway, A. 2004. Intimations of everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city. Cultural Studies 18 (2-3):384–408.

Graham, S. 2002. Flow City: Networked Mobilities and the Contemporary Metropolis. Journal of Urban Technology 9 (1):1-20.

Graham, S., and S. Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. New York: Routledge.

Greenfield, A. 2006. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Berkeley: New Riders Publishing.

Greenfield, A., and M. Shepard. 2007. Situated Technologies Phamplets 1: Urban Computing and its Discontents. New York City: The Architectural League of New York.

Kaika, M., and E. Swyngedouw. 2000. Fetishizing the Modern City: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.

Latour, B. 2005a. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York City: Oxford University Press.

Latour, B. 2005b. From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. B. Latour and P. Weibel, 14 - 43. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Latour, B. and Hermant, E. (2006 [1998]) Paris: Invisible City, trans. L. Carey-Libbrecht. Available at: http:// www.bruno-latour.fr/livres/viii_paris-city-gb.pdf

Law, J., and J. Urry. 2001. Enacting the social. Economy and Society 33 (3):390-410.

Mitchell, W. J. 2003. Me++:  The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

McFarlane, C. 2011a. Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

McFarlane, C. 2011. Assemblage and critical urbanism. City 15 (2):204-224.

Sassen, S. 2011a. Open Source Urbanism. Domus. http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/open-source-urbanism/ (last accessed 15 November 2011).

Sassen, S. 2011b. Talking back to your intelligent city. http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/cities/talking-back-to-your-intelligent-city (last accessed 15 November 2011).

Shepard, M. (ed.). 2011. Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space. 2011. Cambridge, MA: The Architectural League of New York and MIT Press.

Star, S. L. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43 (3):377-391.

Star, S. L. 2002. Infrastructure and ethnographic practice Working on the fringes. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 14 (2):107-122.

UNPF (United Nations Population Fund). 2007. State of the World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2007/ presskit/pdf/sowp2007_eng.pdf (accessed 30 October 2011).

Varnelis, K. 2008. Introduction: Networked Ecologies. In The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, ed. Varnelis, Kazys. Barcelona: Actar.

Varnelis, K. 2011. A Manifesto for Looseness. http://vimeo.com/33423863 (last accessed 11 December 2011).

Zimmerman, R., and T. A. Horan. 2004. Digital infrastructures: enabling civil and environmental systems through information technology. Routledge.

the networked city and geographic blogging projects

An AT&T cellular antenna bordering the Hawthorne Cultural Center's playground on one side and a residential neighborhood on the other at South 13th St. and Carpenter St. in South Philadelphia.

Everyday Structures was recently mentioned on Mammoth, an architecture/landscape/infrastructure blog that I would consider a a key contributor to the emerging dialogue that seeks to examine anew our networked, crowded, polluted, amazing and always-changing landscape. I wanted to acknowledge how rewarding it is to receive mention from a blog I have followed for the last few years, and to address some of the points raised in Mammoth's post about this blog.

Rob Holmes writes at Mammoth:

In a recent conversation with a couple other landscape architects, I noted that I think geographers are, in many ways, doing a better job of conceptualizing landscape than landscape architects, particularly with relation to infrastructural conditions in the networked city — Wiig’s blog is an excellent example of that.

This is an on point observation because one of the reasons I started this blog was to address these issues. The sphere of architecture blogging that has become prominent, such as Bldgblog, City of Sound, Mammoth itself, Kazys Varnelis's blog, Pruned, Infranet Lab and even newer additions such as Urban Omnibus and Polis come more from an architecture and design focus. This is in no way a bad way to approach the contemporary landscape, but there are other ways to do so. My interest has been in the relationships that emerge when you mix together old and new spaces, and more-so, in the spaces of the infrastructural systems that support our contemporary, networked landscape. There are some people doing similar work that I really enjoy, such as Friends of the Pleistocene and Necessity for Ruins, and even a Geography professor blogging at Cosmopolis, Matthew Gandy, whose work has been instrumental to my scholarship (I also need to mention the Center for Land Use Interpretation as a key contributor to my way of seeing infrastructure and the networked city). But there is always room for new voices as well as the need for geographic investigations to step away from the traditional means of publishing in academic journals. I see the geography of the networked city as one where proximity and distance are mediated through wireless, ubiquitous technological devices such as mobile phones, where space is interspersed with hertzian flows of communicative information that may be invisible to the human eye, but are still locatable in the infrastructural components that produce and maintain these flows.

The geography of the networked city is at base its infrastructure--the systems that maintain the flows of people, goods, and information across a constantly shifting landscape, what Kazys Varnelis termed the 'networked ecologies' of our cities. Varnelis defines 'networked ecologies as:

a series of codependent systems of environmental mitigation, land-use organization, communication and service delivery…[These infrastructures] are networked, hypercomplex systems produced by technology, laws, political pressures, disciplinary desires, environmental constraints and a myriad other pressures, tied together with feedback mechanisms. Networked ecologies embody the dominant form of organization today, the network, but these networks can be telematic, physical, or even social. (from the introduction to The Infrastructural City, page 15)   

Mammoth organized and contributed to a bloggers' reading group based around the most complete guide to the networked city thus far: The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, which Varnelis edited. As Rob Holmes points out above, Everyday Structures is an attempt to continue this investigation into the landscape of the networked city, into the mix of natural and cultural, infrastructural backgrounds and the foregrounded built environment of cities today.

The Infrastructural City is an overview that leaves open the need to continue these discussions, as well to add to the subjects covered. There are many new geographies emerging out of (or into?) the networked city, relationships layered among industrial technologies of the modern city, the suburban and rural spaces scattered about, and the natural environment that still underlies everything else, even in the networked city. With the holiday lull between semesters in effect right now, I will get back on track with this blog. I have the time to devote to putting together more writing and photography, to continue tracing the spaces and places that make up the networked city today.

orange tubing, underground

In SEPTA's Juniper Station the other night, waiting for the trolley to West Philadelphia, I noticed the horizontal orange conduit at the top of the photograph running along the ceiling, in contrast to the dark green and dirty light grey of the rest of the wall. I would bet that the orange tubing houses some fiber optic cable, running between buildings above ground, but through the public transit tunnel underneath. On the other hand, the cable might connect to the cellular antenna that provide mobile connectivity in the station, or it work in both scenarios.

the geologic city at work

Asphalt folding and flowing around a taxicab's tires. Midtown Manhattan, early fall 2011.

For those who have not yet picked up a copy of the Friends of the Pleistocene's Geologic City: a Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York, I strongly encourage you to do so. The guide delves into the geologic underpinnings of New York City, from the Chilean origins of the rock salt that is spread on the city's streets every winter to the Indiana limestone that clads many of the city's iconic buildings. Geologic City is a small book that has the ability to radically change how we see urban places, to situate the flows of human and natural elements at various speeds from the speed of light or the speed of sound, to the flow of water or the erosion of stone, among the cultural and economic exchanges that are more commonly foregrounded as the work of a city such as New York City. My favorite part of the book is the inspiration it offers to conduct similar explorations of other places. While I would enjoy seeing another North American city treated in a similar fashion, it would be great to see this approach applied, for instance, to an African city or an Asian one.

suburban despair...?

Near the Cracker Barrel alongside the Cross County Trail heading into Plymouth Meeting, PA.

Living in Philadelphia without a automobile of my own, I rarely head into the suburban fringe ringing the city except on bicycle rides. The Schuylkill River Trail runs upriver past Valley Forge, at some point in the next few years heading all the way to Reading. The Cross County Trail winds its way north away from the Schuylkill into Plymouth Meeting, through a wetland, past a power plant with a tall smokestack, then quickly into the morass of lightly-planned strip malls, corporate chain stores, and other indicators of upper middle class living in the United States.

What I enjoy about heading out to this area is how visible the infrastructural networks are. There are high voltage electricity lines parading across the fields, and this stormwater management system adjacent to the Cracker Barrel's parking lot is nicely designed and well-maintained. The stormwater retention pond looks almost natural; the willows and other foliage are healthy and doing their job keeping the soil in place through their root structures. 

But that bright red shopping cart, what is it doing keeled over in six inches of water? Did it wash down in the last storm, or was it thrown down from above, the victim of some minor theft? Regardless, the red shopping cart from one of the nearby box stores provides some welcome color into this late fall scene, exposing how this almost-natural-looking landscape is the product of human intervention, down to the abandoned shopping cart laying on its side in the pond.

 

warning: underground cable

A utility pole in Lincoln Park, Chicago. In the alley behind Big Apple Finer Foods. I always enjoy seeing the different fonts and symbols AT&T and the other telecommunications providers use, and how the designs change over time. These white stickers seem to have replaced bright orange ones.

old and discarded, old and restored and for sale

Televisions. Manhattan. October 2011.

Typewriters. Philadelphia. October 11. Neither of these devices were produced to connect to the Internet. The typewriters don't even have a screen, let alone a touchscreen. With as much time as I spend on various computing devices--primarily a laptop, a desktop, and a mobile phone--it is difficult to consider typing on a typewriter or consuming popular culture from a television and not through online sources. And both of these technologies are not even that ancient; the typewriters will certainly still function when all of my current computers have ceased working.

 

brown pipe

along the Schuylkill River. This tube will soon hold up a traffic sign.

portable cellular antenna site in the redwoods

Between Porter College and Kresge College, University of California, Santa Cruz, June 2010.

Peter Sloterdijk, data centers and the spaces of networked, psychedelic capitalism

What was 365 Main's Oakland data center near Jack London Square, now owned by Digital Realty Trust. 2nd St. and Brush St., Oakland in January 2010. (photo by author; map here).

Peter Sloterdijk: In your exploration of the "architectures of foam," you write that modernity renders the issue of residence explicit. What do you mean by that? 

Peter Sloterdijk: Here I am developing an idea that Walter Benjamin addressed in his Arcades Project. He starts from the anthropological assumption that people in all epochs dedicate themselves to creating interiors, and at the same time he seeks to emancipate this motif from its apparent timelessness. He therefore asks the question: How does capitalist man in the 19th century express his need for an interior? The answer is: He uses the most cutting-edge technology in order to orchestrate the most archaic of all needs, the need to immunize existence by constructing protective islands. In the case of the arcade, modern man opts for glass, wrought iron, and assembly of prefabricated parts in order to build the largest possible interior. For this reason, Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, erected in London in 1851, is the paradigmatic building. It forms the first hyper-interior that offers a perfect expression of the spatial idea of psychedelic capitalism. It is the prototype of all later theme-park interiors and event architectures. The arcade heralds the abolition of the outside world. It abolishes outdoor markets and brings them indoors, into a closed sphere. The antagonistic spatial types of salon and market meld here to form a hybrid. This is what Benjamin found so theoretically exciting: The 19th-century citizen seeks to expand his living room into a cosmos and at the same time to impress the dogmatic form of a room on the universe. This sparks a trend that is perfected in the 20th-century apartment design as well as in shopping-mall and sports-stadium design-there are the three paradigms of modern construction, that is, the construction of micro-interiors and macro-interiors. (p. 128)*

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Sloterdijk identifies the place in the middle of the 18th-century where capitalist society embedded itself even more into the urban fabric. This "psychedelic capitalism" identified itself through an exhibition space that would twist and morph into the generic, everyday shopping mall--before that mall became so bland to be unseen and thus naturalized in the landscape as the place where shopping happens, the type of building had to be created.

If the Crystal Palace transformed society, as a space that moved social and economic relations inside, is there a subsequent contemporary example that has equally transformed our networked society? Is it still the shopping mall, or could it be a data center? Data centers house the Net, hosting websites, storing email, and the like. They do not provide interior spaces for individuals to shop or socialize, but they do organize and produce the flows of information around which society, to a large extent these days, functions. The shopping mall now competes with online retailers, the salon where people would gather to socialize now competes-and has probably lost-to online social media such as Facebook. But the design of the data center is in no way celebrated and is rarely even acknowledged in the urban landscape in the way Sloterdijk talks of the Crystal Palace. As is evident in the picture above of a data center near downtown Oakland, the design seems intended to reinforce the secure, citadel-like, veiled anonymity of the building and, consequently, the activities that go on inside. There is little in the way of hyper-interiors in a data center. The interior space they produce is located on the computer's monitor or the smartphone's touchscreen, accessible only to the individual holding the device. The space itself fades into the urban background, visible only when you are looking for it.

The utility of urban space to declare the motives and intentions of "psychedelic capitalism" in its current incarnation still exists, just look at any spectacular skyscraper development, but perhaps the organizational space for our society today is embodied in the largely anonymous data centers that are scattered about the landscape, providing the data for our ubiquitous connectivity, but, spatially at least, fading into the metropolitan background we move through daily.

*from an interview with Peter Sloterdijk at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 17 February, 2009, where Sloterdijk asked himself the questions. Transcribed in Harvard Design Magazine 30, Spring/Summer 2009.